There’s a lot to be said for collecting and storing data about yourself: it can give you a valuable, objective insight into your daily life. But how much is too much?
WIRED spoke to Chris Dancy, who likes to track his life. Really, seriously, track his life. From the article:
At the moment, he tracks everything he can, even if he doesn’t see an immediate benefit, so long as it’s relatively easy to collect – and he can save the data into Evernote, Google Calendar, and Excel. You never know when something seemingly pointless will come in handy in the future.
“If I’m on a call and my voice gets over 50 decibels, my phone notifies me,” he says. “My heart rate after a conference call usually can give me better insight into the call and my feelings about the call.”
There are two schools of thought here. One could argue that if you’re going to log personal data, you may as well preserve every scrap you can. Another might argue that this kind of data capture is so insanely neurotic that it’s unhealthy. What do you think? Is there such a thing as too much? And if so, what is it? [WIRED via Flowing Data]